Dear friends and fellow Europeans,
Thank you very much for inviting me to speak today.
I have been scheduled in today’s programme to talk about media diversity and digital democracy.
I fully recognise that for many people on mainland Europe that diversity, and the political rhetoric that surrounds it, is often seen as an Anglophone import from the US and the UK and not relevant to the political realities and culture of the rest of Europe.
Diversity can be seen as a politically correct agenda only relevant in societies obsessed with so-called “identity politics”.
Therefore I do not want to use the word diversity today and instead I will be using another term today instead - “democracy”.
Let’s start with a simple thought experiment.
A lot of people are concerned about the prospect of a single person controlling Twitter - one of the most important mediums of communication on the planet - influencing elections and political discourse.
Now what would we think of it being a single billionaire would it be OK if it was two people?
What about 100 people?
What about 1,000?
Now imagine it was a million… but they were all white men in Europe. Or - given the current war in Ukraine - maybe all white men in Russia.
How would we feel about that?
All of a sudden it becomes less about quantity and more about quality. While the number of people controlling Twitter is still important - the idea of that degree of concentration of power and control into a single person is alarming - the problem is not solved simply by increasing the number of people. It is also about the qualities of those people.
With the current Ukraine crisis the problems are obvious if it was controlled by a million Russians. But let’s take another example; how would you feel if you were a Black person and you knew Twitter was disproportionately controlled by White people - White people in the US who overwhelmingly voted for a presidential candidate who made comments supporting white supremacist groups.
This is not a hypothetical of course.
This is the reality - in the 2020 US presidential elections almost 60% of White people voted for Donald Trump.
We see variations of this reality being played out all the time with one powerful group in charge of social media platforms making decisions that affect another group.
Last year Facebook, who owns Instagram, apologised after it was revealed it had been blocking Instagram posts which contained the hashtag #AlAqsa or its Arabic counterparts #الاقصى, or hiding them from search results. According to Facebook the mistake occurred due to the Al-Aqsa name, a famous mosque, being associated with terrorist organizations.
A few days earlier Twitter blamed technical errors for deleting posts and suspending accounts mentioning the possible eviction of Palestinians from the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah.
The question that Facebook or Twitter did not answer was, what was the demographic of the people making these decisions on which hashtags to promote or block?
The suspicion of course is that the people making - what are effectively editorial decisions - are disproportionately based in the US, white and male - although the people implementing the decisions might be based in Kenya or anywhere else in the world.
Social media and other digital platforms are increasingly deciding the flow of information and what makes up our political discourse. The problem is the people deciding which conversations and which issues to prioritize are from a small global minority.
One of the core principles of a representative democracy is equal representation. Unless we have equal representation of who decides what we should be talking about we do not have democracy.
The lack of equal and fair representation in the editorial decision making on the social media platforms is an existential threat to our democracies in the same way as if they were controlled by a single billionaire.
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